Graphical user interfaces (GUI's) have been used with great success to simplify and enhance user interaction with computers. In a GUI environment, a combination of text and graphical objects are displayed on a computer display, with a user able to interact with various objects predominantly through “pointing and clicking” with a user-manipulated pointer controlled by a mouse or similar device. GUI environments are often highly intuitive, as a user is able to perform a desired action on a particular object simply by pointing at the object and initiating a desired action. For example, if a user wants to see the files stored on a particular disk drive accessible via a computer, the user may be permitted to point and click on an icon that represents the disk drive, resulting in the display of a window that lists the drive contents.
One area in which GUI's have been employed is that of hardware component management. Hardware component management is used to manage (i.e., to configure and/or obtain status information about) hardware components in a computer or computer system. Conventional GUI environments often permit users, for example, to select icons associated with particular hardware components to perform management operations on the underlying components. For example, in a GUI environment a user may be permitted to pull up a context-sensitive menu by selecting a disk drive icon to perform operations such as formatting the disk drive associated with the icon. Also, dialog boxes may be accessed via icons to perform more advanced configuration operations on underlying hardware components. In some instances, hardware components may even be grouped together into a “control panel” window or a tree-like representation where icons are arranged hierarchically and grouped by type, e.g., where multiple disk drives are grouped together under a “disk drive” heading.
While GUI-based component managers offer substantial usability improvements over older, more cumbersome text-based component managers, most such GUI-based component managers have been found to be somewhat limited in the ability to inform a user of the underlying physical configuration of a hardware component within a computer system—specifically where in a computer a particular hardware component is physically located. Management of a computer or computer system often incorporates more than simple software configuration; oftentimes a user is required to physically access hardware components to effectively manage the overall system.
Conventional GUI-based component managers typically identify the location of a hardware component by identifying the slot or port to which such a component is connected. Looking at the actual computer, however, specific slots or ports may be difficult to locate, and a user may have difficulty in physically locating specific hardware components in the computer.
Moreover, this problem is significantly greater in complex multi-unit computer systems such as servers, midrange computers and mainframe computers, where the number of manageable hardware components can be overwhelming. For example, some enterprise-level storage systems are capable of housing hundreds of individual disk drives in large physical enclosures, and simply providing a user with a slot location in an enclosure for a particular disk drive may still leave the user with the daunting task of locating that particular slot among hundreds in the physical enclosure. In short, there is little information provided in conventional GUI environments that interrelates the logical location of a hardware component (i.e., with respect to the overall logical or software organization of a computer) with the physical location of the hardware computer in the computer.
In some GUI environments, a displayed pictorial representation of a computer has been used to a limited extent to facilitate management of hardware components in the computer. For example, one conventional GUI environment for a laptop computer displays a pictorial representation of the laptop computer, with icons associated with various external devices capable of being connected to the computer disposed around the periphery of the pictorial representation and visually linked to specific external ports on the computer by lines extending from the icons to the depictions of the ports on the pictorial representation of the computer. Management of the underlying hardware components is performed using the icons, and is limited to interaction via singular icons, and to hardware components located on a single computer. Furthermore, such an environment is typically statically defined for a particular computer design, as the environment is based principally on the ports, rather than the devices that could be connected to those ports.
Despite the additional information with regard to physical location that is provided by the display of a pictorial representation in the aforementioned GUI environment, for more complex managed environments, where potentially hundreds of hardware components need to be managed, a significant need still exists for greater flexibility and usability in terms of GUI-based hardware component management. Therefore, a continued need continues to exist in the art for a GUI-based hardware component management environment offering greater usability, flexibility and functionality than conventional GUI-based environments.